The Brooklyn Rail

Swedish composer Ellen Arkbro makes slow music that highlights the moment of a chord change. One chord, sustained; another chord, sustained; and so on—overtones everywhere. Having studied with La Monte Young, the reclusive dean of American minimal music, and Catherine Christer Hennix, the late polymathic dame of Stockholm alternative tunings and electroacoustic music, Arkbro is firmly in a tradition of composers whose music requires deep and attentive listening. But her music could be even slower, and longer, and there could be fewer chord changes. That’s part of the reason why she doesn’t care to call what she makes “drone” music, which tends to be sometimes hours long and have few, if any, chord changes. Arkbro’s music seems to ask not what happens when nothing changes, but what happens when something changes. Whether she’s writing for organ and brass (the eponymous title of her first record in 2017), guitar (CHORDS, 2019), or, most recently, solo organ (Sounds While Waiting, 2023), her sound is mystical, colorful, and sad, like calls without responses.

The five solo organ improvisations on her newest record, Nightclouds (Blank Forms Editions), recorded live from 2023 to 2024, feature the most radical dissonances, timbres, and overtones yet in her discography. Arkbro tends toward the cosmic and away from the worldly, and Nightclouds is no exception. But her other new record, How do I know if my cat likes me? (Blank Forms Editions), performed with organist Hampus Lindwall and language artist Hanne Lippard, is seeping with cultural critique—references to call wait times, online banking, fun facts, and ChatGPT, to name a few. Arkbro spoke from Berlin about this contrast and, occupied by her two Sanskrit-named cats, Līla and Nāda, about her search for meaning in an ever-accelerating world.

Ben Gambuzza (Rail): Bring me through your process of experimenting with the organ to make Nightclouds.

Arkbro: I started exploring that way of playing organ a few years ago when Hampus Lindwall asked me to write a piece that he would play. He was organizing a concert with Cory Arcangel for Art Night London and wanted to commission an organ piece. I started exploring this way of playing where you hold down a chord on the organ with weights or with little pegs, and, instead of playing on the keyboard, you play with the registration. It’s nothing new—many people have explored that. But I’ve worked a lot with synthesis and SuperCollider, and I was imagining a low frequency oscillator changing a filter or some aspects of the chords. And you get these chordal shifts, but from changing the set of pipes that are playing the one chord. When I’ve been playing solo or in concerts, it’s mostly been bringing some harmonic materials but then improvising around that.

Rail: I noticed the changes on Nightclouds, with the exception of “Morningclouds,” are more frantic than on your other records. The durations of each chord are shorter.

Arkbro: I’ve heard some people—including my dad, actually—say, “It’s moving too fast.” [Laughs]

Rail: Why is that?

Arkbro: [Laughs] I was just having fun. I was playing at Orgelpark in Amsterdam and I found these chords that I thought sounded a little bit like Allan Holdsworth or some fusion style. It’s intuitive, when the change should be happening. And sometimes, it’s hard to know if your intuition is something or nothing. I feel very frustrated whenever the music feels arbitrary. That’s my biggest fear—that it’s sort of, like, “Ah, some nice chord changes, or some random.” That can really make me depressed. And when it works out, the form is right. And when that doesn’t happen, I’m just making ambient music.

Rail: When did you first start thinking about music in terms of architecture, or space?

Arkbro: There were a few things that I heard when I started thinking more about experimenting with sound and studying electroacoustic composition: La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano, Éliane Radigue’s stuff. But with The Well-Tuned Piano, that’s like the best music lesson I’ve ever experienced, listening to that piece. I’m blown away every time. And then another thing to mention would be Arthur Russell’s Tower of Meaning, where it feels like there are these building blocks. That’s how I visualize the music.

Rail: What did you study with La Monte Young?

Arkbro: Young and Marian Zazeela had one of their performing periods when I was there. They would do three or four performances a week, so I listened to them doing raga darbari [or darbari kanada]. It’s something I had forgotten about in these last few years that I’m coming back to now, listening to Pandit Pran Nath and his teacher. When I started playing concerts, I had just studied with La Monte and was very in that headspace.

Rail: What kind of headspace did he get you into when you spent time there?

Arkbro: They lived in their own world. They created a world that they lived in, in every sense. They had a different clock that they followed. They would not be awake and asleep when other people were. They fully lived their music and their art. They were breathing that. Maybe now I can think of it, like, “Oh, there’s some control things there.” [Laughs] And I can maybe pivot a little bit to Catherine Christer Hennix. She would always say, when we would present a concert with her music, “No, you don’t understand. We’re trying to do something impossible. Our music is otherworldly.” And it felt like she was from another planet, and La Monte was a little bit the same. You wonder where they came from—like aliens. How did they end up in this world and live a life and actually become old? It’s fascinating that they stayed weird.

Rail: How do you stay weird?

Arkbro: First of all, I think I’ve sort of lost touch with that spiritual aspect of sound and music. That’s one thing that has made me feel a little bit depressed when it comes to music-making. Recently, I went back to a lot of the music that I came from. La Monte and that whole scene: New York, sixties, seventies; Catherine Christer Hennix; Olivier Messiaen; Éliane Radigue; raga; other sort of folky, bluesy music; Henry Flynt. That’s given me so much solace—to just be reminded there were other people who have been wanting to make slow music and who’ve been interested in the same kind of sonic experiences. I think the people that I feel like I share a lot with are not necessarily around me here.

Rail: You’ve said in the past that you like to keep your music abstract and not concerned with worldly things or culture or politics, but How do I know if my cat likes me? is extremely concerned with all that stuff.

Arkbro: I know—I’m having a difficult time with it, honestly. [Laughs] But this is not my solo music, so I think of this as a different thing. But with the work that I do myself, I want it to feel timeless. And with this, it’s dated in several ways; it’s very much iPhone, internet-culture references, and ChatGPT [Laughs]. And for me, I can feel like there’s something that gets a little bit stuck with that—when something has such a clear place, like, “Okay, this is that, here.” And then I feel like it’s almost an object that becomes an obstacle that I have to walk around. But I also love that we came together, and it just happened very naturally. We had a friend crush, all three of us. So, I think I want to honor that, too.

Rail: Your own music plays around so much with timelessness, in the sense of without-time, but there’s also a saturation of time. The listener is experiencing time so vividly because of the slowness of the music.

Arkbro: It’s almost like witnessing time passing and sort of studying your mind and feeling how time feels differently with every chord change. I’m very nostalgic, as I said. There’s something that I find so unbearable with time passing, [laughs] and changes. Everything is in constant change. It’s like the biggest sadness ever.

Rail: Your compositions aren’t as long as some composers who explore similar durational music. How do you know when to stop playing?

Arkbro: I think I’m more attuned to a popular… I grew up watching MTV and listening to three-minute songs, and I also don’t like concerts that are too long. A concert can be seven hours and not be too long, but sometimes a concert is forty-five minutes and it’s too long, and you’re uncomfortable, like, “It ended fifteen minutes ago, why do you keep making sound?” Or those situations where someone is playing and they’re fading out and you have this feeling of, “Yeah, it’s ending, yes, now, definitely,” and then they start again and you say, “No!” [Laughs] For me, moving over an hour or so, it goes into a different territory where I lose my sense of form. And then it becomes more like the chord in space. Installation format is where I would go after an hour.

Rail: We’ve talked about timelessness in your music, but I’m also curious about placelessness. Is there anything Swedish about your music?

Arkbro: I do think that extreme seasons—living in darkness for six months and then living in light for six months—have some profound effect on you. I used to sing in choirs, like Swedish choir music. And there’s a song called “Sommarpsalm.” And there’s a phrase toward the end—translating from Swedish: “All flesh is hay, and the flowers wither, and time keeps on passing, and the Word of the Lord is the only thing that stays.” And we would sing this when we went on summer break. We would meet in church and we would sing this song all together and then you would run out and you would be, “Hey, summer is here!” The fact that you were reminded that first day of summer that all the flowers will wither: this too will pass. There was something so beautiful and sad about that. Also, we celebrate Midsummer in Sweden and the solstice—that’s the brightest day of the year. And the first thing that people say the next day, when you wake up in the morning, you make coffee and say, “It’s only going to get darker from here.” [Laughter]

Rail: The seasons in Sweden are kind of like your very own La Monte Young clock.

Arkbro: Definitely. I’ve also been revisiting Angus MacLise’s Universal Solar Calendar and reading every day the name of the day.

Rail: What’s the name of today on that calendar?

Arkbro: Today is April seventeenth: “Cryptic tailgate of the mourners.”